Show Notes
On this episode of Nuance, Case is joined by the Reverend Dr. Gabriel Salguero, pastor of The Gathering Place and President of the National Latino Evangelical Coalition. They explore the perspectives and priorities of Latino evangelicals in the upcoming presidential election, highlighting the diversity within the Latino community and the need for nuanced understanding and representation in the media and political discourse. Dr. Salguero also calls attention to the diversity of evangelicalism in America and the importance of not allowing it to be co-opted by hyper-partisanship or political expediency.
Episode Resources:
The Gathering: https://www.tgporl.org/
National Association of Evangelicals: https://nalec.org/ https://www.facebook.com/nalec.org/
“Latino evangelicals push for immigration reform ahead of election” (Religious News Service): https://religionnews.com/2024/08/12/latino-evangelicals-push-for-immigration-reform-ahead-of-election/
The Bebbington Quadrilateral: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_W._Bebbington
The Benedict Option: A Strategy for Christians in a Post-Christian Nation by Rob Dreher: https://www.amazon.com/dp/0735213291
Nuance is a podcast of The Collaborative where we wrestle together about living our Christian faith in the public square. Nuance invites Christians to pursue the cultural and economic renewal by living out faith through work every facet of public life, including work, political engagement, the arts, philanthropy, and more.
Each episode, Dr. Case Thorp hosts conversations with Christian thinkers and leaders at the forefront of some of today’s most pressing issues around living a public faith.
Our hope is that Nuance will equip our viewers with knowledge and wisdom to engage our co-workers, neighbors, and the public square in a way that reflects the beauty and grace of the Gospel.
Learn more about The Collaborative:
Website: https://collaborativeorlando.com/
Get to know Case: https://collaborativeorlando.com/team/
Episode Transcript
Case Thorp
Food stalls line the edges of the town square, offering a wide range of cuisines from Latin American street tacos and Indian curries to Middle Eastern kebabs, East Asian dumplings. Aromas fill the air. In the center of the square, a large fountain serves as a gathering point with intricate designs from African patterns to Asian motifs. Street performers dressed in traditional clothing entertain the crowd with music and dance. You might hear the rhythmic beats of African drums blending with the melodies of Spanish guitar. Murals adorn the walls, celebrating different people groups, their resilience and their unity. You and I, we mingle. We get to know folks. We share stories and experiences, talk about our own favorite foods. Here, we find a sense of community that transcends cultural boundaries. This public square is a living testament to multiculturalism, where diversity is not only accepted, but celebrated. It’s a place where everyone feels welcome and the richness of different cultures is woven into the very fabric of the community. Well, friends, the beauty of that scene is what brings us to our guest today, the Reverend Dr. Gabriel Salguero. Gabriel, thank you for being here today.
Gabriel Salguero
My pleasure to be here. Thanks for the invitation, Case. Appreciate it.
Case Thorp
Well, so Gabriel and I ran into each other at a conference that the Collaborative held here recently with Russell Moore. And dude, I didn’t realize, like, you’re a big deal. And by that, I mean, friends, you’ll hear me. He has a national reputation and profile as a great leader. And you’re also just around the corner from me. I’m sorry we didn’t run into each other earlier.
Gabriel Salguero
Listen, here’s what I want you to do. That segment where you said I’m a big deal, record it and send it to my wife and my kids. They know my humanity, but thank you. And I’m glad to be around the corner from you. And that was a great event where we thought together and prayed together about faith in public life. You do great work at The Collaborative.
Case Thorp
Yeah. Well, man, I appreciate it. I really thought that it was a substantive conversation. But yeah, I’ll take that, saying you’re a big deal. Make a little GIF, a GIF, G -I -F, and you can text that out to your staff, you know, even to your peers. Well, to you, our viewers and friends, welcome to Nuance, where we seek to be faithful in the public square. I’m Case Thorp. And please like, subscribe, share so that others can hear the good work we’re doing here. We got numbers here recently on the Nuance podcast, and I just want to thank so many of you because there’s lots more eyeballs and ears out there and that’s wonderful. Well, let me tell you a bit about Gabriel. Reverend Dr. Salguero is the pastor of The Gathering Place, a Latino-led multi-ethnic Assemblies of God congregation right around the corner from me here in Orlando. He’s also the president and founder of the National Latino Evangelical Coalition, a national coalition of several thousand evangelical congregations in the U.S. He was the former director of the Hispanic Leadership Program and the Institute for Faith and Public Life at Princeton Theological Seminary. Dude, have we talked about this? Like, did we overlap there?
Gabriel Salguero
I don’t know what years you were there, but I was there, I think around 2005 was when I worked there. So I was there for about five years running those programs. When were you there?
Case Thorp
Well, I left in 2000, but my goodness, it’s the most beautiful place in the world. It really is. And I’ve been a lot of places in this world and I still contend Princeton’s just gorgeous. Well, that’s cool. I didn’t know we had that connection. So Gabriel has written extensively on Latino evangelicalism, immigration, racism, and multicultural congregations. He was named as one of the nation’s most prominent Latino evangelical leaders by the New York Times, Huffington Post, CNN, Espanol and more. Reverend Salguero has served on the White House Faith-based Advisory Council. Gabe, which president was that with?
Gabriel Salguero
I actually advised two presidents when I lived in New York, George W. Bush and Barack Obama.
Case Thorp
Okay. And also on the National Association of Evangelicals. He has degrees from Rutgers, New Brunswick Theological Seminary, and a doctorate in divinity from Eastern Nazarene. And I know he’s most proud of his wife, the Reverend Jeanette Salguero, and their two sons. Is Jeanette on your church staff?
Gabriel Salguero
Jeanette is the executive pastor and she’s the co-founder of the National Latino Evangelical Coalition and she runs the Hispanic leadership programs at Southeastern University. So she’s a leader in her own right. The fact is that she’s the brains behind the operation.
Case Thorp
Okay. You’re the brawn. You’re the brawn. Right? Right. Well, maybe I need to have her on my next podcast. What’s it like, being your wife’s boss? Does that work?
Gabriel Salguero
Yes, yes. Actually, she’s my boss and so it’s great. Listen, we’ve been married 23 years, Jeanette and I, and we have a wonderful relationship. It’s a dance, you know. Sometimes we waltz and sometimes we merengue and cha-cha. So to co -lead and to be married, it’s a dance and we have to learn how to respect each other’s giftings and limitations.
Case Thorp
Ha ha ha! You know, I would love to do the cha-cha with Jodie Thorp. I just don’t know if she would love to do that. I like it. So tell me about your two sons.
Gabriel Salguero
So my oldest son is 19 years old and he’s gonna be a sophomore at UPenn, University of Pennsylvania, where he’s studying neurobiology and psychiatry. And my youngest son is 15 and he’s a sophomore in high school here at Lake Nona High School in Orlando, Florida. And they’re just both wonderful young men. They love the Lord. They’re good brothers and great sons. And really, I think that they’re a gift to Jeanette and I, really involved in the church and really committed to becoming the kind of men this society needs.
Case Thorp
I love hearing that. Now you mentioned UPenn. Do you happen to know Davi Gomes in Brazil?
Gabriel Salguero
I don’t know that name.
Case Thorp
He is a national leader in the Brazilian Church Presbyterian. He is also the Executive Director of the World Reform Fellowship. Anyway, his son is also at UPenn and in the neurosciences in some way. I’m not exactly sure where.
Gabriel Salguero
Really? Well then after this podcast we got to connect them. That’s really interesting. Small world.
Case Thorp
Yeah, I’d do that. Well, Gabriel, we’ve got an interesting presidential election coming up. The last few have been kind of interesting, wouldn’t you say? I’m tired in some ways. A lot of people are tired. But just give me your perspective on the election in general, and then particularly to how you see things from the Latino community.
Gabriel Salguero
Look, I think the word interesting is a powerful adjective. There’s an old Chinese proverb that says, may you be given the grace to live in interesting times or maybe lead in interesting times. Look, I think that our nation since before COVID has been hyper-polarized and sometimes that hyper-polarization goes to new heights during election cycles. And so my hope is that we find leadership that seeks not to divide but to unite and to heal. Our nation needs genuine statesmen and stateswomen at every level of leadership from local mayors to the White House that knows how to heal a nation that’s been hurting from polarization for such a long time. And the truth is that whether you’re a business leader or a pastor or a church planter, whatever sphere of life you have influence in, I think people are crying passionately for leadership that heals and unites even across difference. That doesn’t mean we can’t have differences and we can’t disagree, but that we find a way to do it in healthy and respectful ways.
Case Thorp
Leadership that heals; I like that. Even if you’re leading hard on a certain policy or perspective, can you do it? And it can be done in a healing way.
Gabriel Salguero
That’s right. I think you can be passionate without being cruel. I think you can have conviction and civility as Richard Mouw has written extensively. Dr. Mouw has often told us that conviction and civility are not antonyms. I agree with him. I agree that we need to have deep conviction. I don’t think we need to compromise on our conviction. But at the same time, we can have civility in our deepest conviction.
Case Thorp
Well, I just spoke with Rich last week for a Nuance interview. And I don’t know if it’ll be out before or after this one, but he really is a good man in terms of civility.
Gabriel Salguero
I think he gets it and he’s written extensively and I’m deeply influenced by how he touches that and how he nuances that understanding of these things are not opposites.
Case Thorp
Well, I agree with those that will point out ethnic voting blocks are not monolithic, and great diversity, particularly within the Latino community, for how they may fall out on different positions. What are some of the key issues though you might say are on Latinos’ minds as they come to this vote?
Gabriel Salguero
Look, first let me say I appreciate that the Nuance Podcast is bringing a diversity of voices and understands the kind of heterogeneity of faith voices, business leaders, and so I appreciate that. Some years ago, I wrote an article for the New York Times, an editorial called Evangelicals Are Not a Monolith.
What I was talking about was the voice of Black, Brown, Asian and First Nation evangelicals that oftentimes when you see the headlines in the big press or print media or TV media or radio they say evangelicals say but there’s no nuance and it’s historically reporting on our white evangelical brothers and sisters. So Latino evangelicals, we’re close to 10 million in this country. One out of every four babies born in the US is Latino and one out of every two babies born in the US is a child of color. so America is changing and Latino evangelicals are part of that demographic change. Some of our priorities are obviously economics, its impact across cultures, the cost of housing, the cost of education. So that’s a big issue. Education, access to quality education, whether that’s in public schools or in faith schools or universities. Immigration has always been an issue for us, there’s close to 70 million Latinos in the US two-thirds of them are US born but one-third are immigrants, and so immigration is is important because you can’t speak to a Latino or Latina church leader business leader not-for-profit leader who doesn’t have some connection to immigrant communities and how immigration policy impacts their families directly or indirectly. I think criminal justice reform and the relationship between communities of color and law enforcement and finding leaders who would know how to heal that and bridge historical chasms. And so there are a whole list of issues. One of the things I tell a lot of people when I get these kind of interviews is that Latino evangelicals are not one issue voters. They vote on a kind of panoply of issues and depending what part of the country you’re in too, right? So I live in Florida. I’m a Puerto Rican living in Florida, born and raised in New Jersey, but I’m Puerto Rican. There’s Mexicans in Texas and California and Salvadorians in Delaware and Maryland and Virginia and Cubans in South Florida and Central Florida. And so the diversity of Hispanicity or Latinidad impacts on how they view their voting priorities. You might speak to a Cuban in Miami or Hialeah, and he or she might be different than a Mexican American in Los Angeles, or a Mexican American in El Paso, or Puerto Rican in Chicago, or Dominican in New York City. And so that rich diversity impacts how we view public policy and voting.
Case Thorp
Well, I don’t think our media, most of it being progressive, helps us because they’ll often say, the Hispanic vote, the Latino voter, and you miss the vast array of difference there. Okay, so a moment ago, you said Hispanica and Latinina?
Gabriel Salguero
Great attempt, you’re doing great.
Case Thorp
Come on, I’m trying. Well, the only language I speak well is Southern, so…
Rev. Dr. Gabriel Salguero
Haha. Latinidad or Hispanicity. Hispanicity is kind of that broad term of US Hispanics, right? Which is, like I said, non-amano. There’s over 22 Spanish- or Portuguese-speaking nations in the world. And so we reflect that rich diversity.
Look, Latino evangelicals are a sub-block of Latinos at large, because there’s Latino Catholics, Latino mainline, the U atheists, agnostics, and so even amongst Hispanics. But Latino evangelicals, historically, over 50 % are self-identified as Republican. About 44% identify as Democrat or Democrat-leaning. And so there’s a rich diversity there.
Although there’s a large group, especially in Florida, where almost it’s a third registered not party affiliated or independent. So they were historically Latino evangelicals, historically independent and the word quintessential swing voters. So you see them vote in both Democrat and Republican lines.
Case Thorp
Interesting. Would it be fair to say that there is a large majority of Latinos in general who are declared Christians, whether it be Roman Catholic or Pentecostal, that there’s more actively Christian Latinos than Caucasians?
Gabriel Salguero
Yeah, I would say that for Hispanics or Latinos, faith and family are important. And so there’s a large portion of Latino Catholics and there’s a large portion of Latino Evangelicals of which the majority of Latino evangelicals self-identify as Pentecostals, two-thirds of Latino evangelicals self-identify as Pentecostal or charismatic or neo-charismatic. Those are in places like Brazil, in places like Guatemala, they’re very, very strong missional movements, church planting movements that is just large. I remind people that probably the most famous religious figure in the country, in the world, is Latino. The Pope, Pope Francis is from Argentina. Probably the most well-known religious figure in the world is Hispanic.
Case Thorp
Yes, that’s right. From Argentina. Yeah. Well, okay. So, help me. I’ve heard the word Latino being used more and more than just Hispanic. So what’s the best choice?
Gabriel Salguero
The answer is there has not been a vote on it. They haven’t gotten all of us together. So there’s no consensus between Hispanic or Latino. People use it differently sometimes. You’ll see people use them interchangeably. But just as a matter of reality is, you know, try to get 69 million people to agree on anything. Hispanic and Latino, I think have been… Hispanic was the term created for the census under the Nixon administration. And then later on, they put Hispanic slash Latino or Latina. And so some people took Latino as a kind of…We’re not going to accept the census categorization from the 1960s. But the truth is that now it’s used often interchangeably. Obviously in some academic circles and some kind of political spaces they use Latin A or Latin X but that’s really not used among Latino faith leaders at large.
Case Thorp
Now, your particular organization, National Latino Evangelical Coalition, tell me your mission and what activities will look like in a voting season or even a non voting season.
Gabriel Salguero
So our slogan is serving and empowering the Latino evangelical church. So we do a lot of things, like we provide theological education and on ramps to graduate degrees for pastors who have not historically had access to it or lay people. We do trainings around administration and infrastructure for churches who don’t have access, but we also do advocacy around public policy issues that impact Hispanics, not just Hispanic evangelicals, but Hispanics and even vulnerable people who may not be Hispanic, white, black, Asian. And so we do advocacy around immigration, around criminal justice, around religious liberty, around educational equity, and a whole host of other issues, pro-life issues. And so we exist to coalesce Latino evangelical voices around common issues, both on the church side, which is leadership and congregational development, and on the public side of advocacy laws. We filed advocacy briefs in the Supreme Court. So we think it’s important that together we are more. If I called a senator and say, hey, I’m Pastor Gabriel, he or she may not listen to me. But if I say, hey, we’re a coalition of 3,000 voices and we think that in our unity there is strength to get things done that benefit the common good from a gospel-centered perspective.
Case Thorp
So would you say you have a platform? Because I think, let’s take the example of immigration. Since there’s a variety of views, what would the coalition’s view be on that? How do you come to that view and then express it?
Gabriel Salguero
Yeah, so we do, I would say that we do have a platform. Hopefully it’s an altar of service more than a platform of self-projection. But I think that we do that through consensus. have a board, we have a national board where we meet to discuss our public policy priorities and we come to a common ground agreement on what our policy stance will be. Now remember, this is an interdenominational board. So we have Assemblies of God pastors, Church of God pastors, Evangelical Covenant pastors. have evangelicals who self -identify as Reformed, evangelicals who self-identify as Wesleyan and, you know, and favorite denomination, non-denominational evangelicals.
Case Thorp
They’re just Baptists in skinny jeans. Come on.
Gabriel Salguero
My goodness, Case. We try to lead through consensus, always deeply informed by the gospel and how the gospel speaks to issues. And so we take our cues, obviously, from scripture because we’re biblically orthodox. But we do that in the council of many voices and leaders on our boards. Our board is over 60 men and women from across the country, and our executive committee which is about seven leaders in addition to myself and Jeanette, we try to execute that. It’s hard work as you can imagine. Any pastor who has a diversity of views, raise that exponentially when you’re talking about different denominations and different geographic regions. I think we do a good job because we, as the prophet Isaiah says, we reason together to try to come to a gospel-centered, informed policy position or advocacy position.
Case Thorp
Yeah. So then what is the coalition’s position on immigration?
Gabriel Salguero
Our position on immigration, and we’re part of the Evangelical Immigration Table, our coalition is one of the founding principles of the Evangelical Immigration Table, which has like 12 or 13 national organizations, including the National Association of Evangelicals, the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, World Relief, a whole host of…the CCCU, the Christian colleges and universities. And so our position is we need to find a way to reconcile the rule of law with humane, comprehensive immigration reform that respects the dignity of every person created in the image of God. So we can at one time deal with issues of border security and national sovereignty without violating the dignity and innate human rights of people coming across the border. It’s this kind of a both and of justice and mercy of rule of law and humane treatment of people who are coming here seeking asylum or seeking a better life or seeking a promised hope in the future as the prophet Jeremiah might say. And so we are deeply rooted in scripture in the book of Hebrews, Remember the stranger because many of you have entertained angels unaware or the book of Deuteronomy or Leviticus and says you shall treat the stranger as a citizen who lives among you because you were once a stranger in Egypt or the very narratives of Jesus who was a immigrant into Egypt because he fled the persecution of Herod and so we have a deeply rooted biblically informed immigration principles; we don’t know each policy until it comes out, until there’s proposed legislation and then we weigh in. But our principles are respect the God-given dignity of every human, no matter if he or she is an immigrant or a citizen, respect the rule of law and find a way forward to reconcile both things.
Case Thorp
Yeah, there is a way to balance compassion and order. And too many of the politicians or parties lean so far on the other and accuse the other of the opposite that we can’t get to compromise our way forward.
Gabriel Salguero
Correct. You know what’s fascinating? Two-thirds of Americans agree on the basic tenets of immigration reform across the political spectrum. But I think because it’s such a political ping-pong, all sides of the aisle use it to garner votes or to try to influence people to vote for them. When the truth is that compromise can happen, there’s a way forward. Most Americans want it. Most evangelicals. There was a LifeWay research that says evangelicals of every stripe want immigration reform that balances the rule of law with humane treatment of people. And I think we can do it. I just think we need a word that’s in high demand and low supply which is courage. Courage.
Case Thorp
Yeah, yeah. Okay, so this bothered me the other day. Actually, we had on this podcast spoken with Michael Graham, who co-wrote with Jim Davis, the book, The Great De-churching. Jim was with us at that conference. And in their research with certified sociologist, Ryan Burge, they uncovered how many individuals in our country will associate the word evangelical with republicanism, with a particular party, and not necessarily understand it theologically like you and I do. In fact, I’m in the evangelical Presbyterian Church denomination and there have been conversations of, we change our name? Do we keep with this because of the way in which that word and its meaning has evolved. So when you’re confronted perhaps with the evangelical commitment to Donald Trump. How do you speak into that and show the landscape?
Gabriel Salguero
I appreciate that question because literally just this week there was a religion news service article on Latino evangelicals that asked me that question. Do we want to hold on to the evangelical nomenclature? Obviously when this airs it’ll be sometime since that article was released but it talks about Latino evangelicals and immigration. What I say to them is the word evangelical is not a political category. It’s theological.
And I’m good with the Bebbington quadrilateral, right? I like it for those people who are listening, know, which is, cruciformity, our commitment to evangelism and action in the world, the centrality of Christ and the authority of scripture. That’s a good place to start as a kind of theological category. So I like Bebbington in that regard. And so what I tell people is evangelical is a theological, not a political category. I myself am registered, not party affiliated. And I’ve met with Democrats and Republicans and independents and I tell people our primary allegiance is to the gospel of Jesus Christ, not to a political party or a political person. And so we have to be careful that we don’t sell our birthright of gospel-centeredness for these kind of soup of political power and access and political proximity. And so what I tell people is I lament when evangelicalism is collapsed into a partisan categorization. It certainly doesn’t represent the rich diversity of evangelicalism in America across generations, cultures, across race. And secondly, it’s not true to the gospel. We have no King but Jesus. We have no Lord but Christ. And so because that is true, when politicians and parties do it right, we applaud it. And when they do it right, wrong, we prophetically and tactfully denounce what’s wrong in those policies. And so I’ve publicly and privately said we cannot allow evangelicalism to be co-opted by hyper-partisanship or political expediency.
Case Thorp
Yeah. Right. So good. You use the word prophetic. I have struggled at times because my tradition, good old whitey Presbyterians, we don’t fully understand or grasp the prophetic voice, that concept. We don’t understand it so much, partly because we’ve been in power. We’ve had the places of privilege and yet we see and Dr. King in minority communities, that tradition of the prophetic voice exercised so beautifully, and it’s clearly in our scripture, and I always teach that prophecy is not first and foremost predicting the future. It is calling truth to power. It is calling out truth to power. And sometimes that does predict the future in terms of particularly the condemnations or things that will result as of your choices.
Talk to us about prophetic voice and what could a primarily Caucasian audience appreciate about it from the scriptures perspective.
Gabriel Salguero
Look, I think when I was in seminary, the classic definition of prophetic or prophecy is speaking truth to power. I’d like to add a second level of definition to that that is often missed. It’s also speaking truth to the power challenged or the power disenfranchised. So it’s not just speaking truth to power, but those who have had power taken from them or been disenfranchised to power. Because truth is multifaceted and multi-directional. It speaks to every community. So part of the truth to people who have been historically power disenfranchised is you matter to God. You have a voice. Moses did not just prophesy to Pharaoh, let my people go. He also prophesied to the B’nai Yisrael, the children of Israel in Goshen when he says, God has created you for liberty and to go worship on the mountain. So oftentimes in classical seminary training that is deeply influenced by theologians like Bonhoeffer and Barthes and you know, all the guys whose last name ends in B, Barthes, Brunner, Bonhoeffer, whom I love, they talk about truth to power. But the truth is that true prophecy speaks to the power and the power disenfranchised. So some years ago I was asked to write a response to an article in Christianity Today by Michael Gerson and Rod Dreher about engagement in the public sphere and so the Benedict option by Dreher which is kind of, now I’m gonna get real kind of theologically nerdy…
Case Thorp
No, good. I follow him on Twitter partly because it’s just so entertaining. But go ahead. I’ll put this in the show notes.
Gabriel Salguero
Yeah, Rod Dreher’s the Benedict option is kind of in the Howard Wassian school of hey, built an alternative community, be a light on the hill, which has its place. It’s a model. My problem with that is it comes from the place of privilege.
If policies are not killing off your people, you can go off to the side and say nothing. If you’re being killed by policy today, you don’t have the luxury to build on alternative community. That’s my critique of Stanley Hauerwas to some degree. And so the second thing is William Wilberforce, another great abolitionist. But he was a parliamentarian. He had power. And so that is another model that has its place if you have access to those corridors of power.
Case Thorp
Good point. Good point.
Gabriel Salguero
But I used the, I called it the King model, which is from the sacred cosmos of the church, right? What Lincoln and Mamaya, the black church historians called the sacred cosmos of the black church. From the root of the church, the prophetic witness of the church, of which King is a product, you speak truth from a gospel centered, kind of church centered witness. So he wasn’t a politician, but he was well educated, went to Boston University.
Case Thorp
Yeah, he was a preacher. And it bothers me for as much as he is discussed, often that fact is either missed, not emphasized. He clearly came from a theological position and that is downplayed and it bothers me.
Rev. Dr. Gabriel Salguero
Yes, that’s right. And so he spoke from, right, he’s deeply drawing from the prophetic text of Amos and the minor prophets, but also from the Exodus narrative. And so, and of course, the prophetic witness of Jesus and John the Baptist in the New Testament and the church that stands against kind of empire and later in the first century, Constantinian Christianity. And so that model should fit for not just racial ethnic minorities evangelicals, but now increasingly white evangelicals who feel like they are having a chicken little moment, who feel that their loss of power is sometimes disenfranchising. Well, maybe it’s liberating for us to reimagine our public witness and reimagine our evangelism and reimagine our civic and public engagement.
Case Thorp
There you go.
Gabriel Salguero
Maybe when you are no longer the majority group, makes you do your, as John the theologian says, your first works over again, the, as Bonhoeffer said in letters and papers from prison, the view from below. Things look differently. And that’s, isn’t that the view of the early church from below? They weren’t in power. And for the most of the church in the world, the churches that are persecuted in very sensitive missional spaces, minority churches in the US and other parts of this country and parts of the world. And so we, I think, need to re-examine scripture from the view from below.
Theologians like Samuel Escobar and Orlando Costas who wrote for Lausanne which is an evangelical movement started by Billy Graham and others talked about that. Hey have we been so enamored with power that we’ve lost our prophetic optics?
Case Thorp
Well, you’re speaking my language. This is exactly my conviction and the work of the Collaborative that we come from an exilic perspective. Now, we got to watch that we don’t overplay the persecuted element because there is true and deep and horrendous persecution out there that doesn’t touch our experience. But I am deeply convicted that Christians, particularly in leadership positions and places of power and privilege, understand what exile is all about so that we’re ready for it. 25 years, 50 years from now, it’s going to be a different faith journey when you got to be different. You have to stand for other values. You have to raise your children differently. And that is so necessary in our discipleship work.
Gabriel Salguero
No, I think that first two things you said, we could spend probably four or five podcasts on. One is perceived persecution versus real persecution. I think that you don’t have power doesn’t mean you’re persecuted. That you’re no longer driving the car doesn’t mean you’re being persecuted. I mean, my Chinese brothers and sisters who have levels of persecution that I can’t even imagine in certain other parts of the Middle East or other parts of the world, we have to kind of have a global view of Christianity to see that. But I do think that perhaps the racial majority church can learn a lot from the African American church or the immigrant church that has lived in exile. know, one of the things anybody who’s done theology of exile can tell you is that it forced them reimagine their relationship with God because they were enamored with the God of the temple and the God of a geographic space.
Case Thorp
Absolutely.
Gabriel Salguero
But now God is the God of the soldier, God of movement, God walking with them through their exile, whether it’s Babylonian, Assyrian, or their occupation, whether it’s the Roman occupation in first century Jerusalem or Palestine. so it requires us to reimagine, I thought this about God, but is this the God of my imagination or the God of the Bible? And so Israel went through that. think evangelicalism in America is going through that moment, but not all of us. Some of us have lived in perpetual exile because some people came on the Mayflower but other came in slave ships and other people crossed hot deserts to be here and barely lost family on the way. And so we don’t all have the same experience but that diversity of experience I think enriches our engagement as Christians and deepens our Christian witness and theology.
Case Thorp
I teach exilic discipleship, and this, to your point, this idea that we don’t carry a Jerusalem -centered faith like maybe some did in the 1950s and 60s, then that being the home, the center of power, rather we need to learn to live in Babylon, where we are folks who have been taken captive by greater culture, that being the secular empirical culture in which we live, therefore discipleship has to look different. Mission has to look different. And like you say, crossing cultural and ethnic boundaries. I think honestly, Gabriel, it is a sad thing that you and I haven’t crossed paths before, but it just shows the bubbles we live in. And particularly the bubble I live in is a white pastor in Orlando, and I’m sorry, our paths should have crossed.
Rev. Dr. Gabriel Salguero
Well, let’s say I’m sorry too. I think there are multiple bubbles we could do, Because you’re in a Reformed space, I’m in a Pentecostal space. Even though I was trained Reformed, I went to Reformed seminaries, I’m not confused, I’m just integrated. But I think that the reality is that we have kind of theological spaces and then we have ethnic spaces and the body of Christ is so beautiful, right? This kind of Revelation 7:9 vision from every tribe, nation, and tongue. And we have to be, Case, and that’s why I appreciate you, and you are becoming quickly a good friend that I can help reflect my faith with, is that we have to be radical boundary crossers.
We have to have a John 4 experience with Jesus and the woman of Samaria. We have to have a kind of Jesus and Syrophoenician woman conversation. We have to have a kind of Pauline moment where, the Gentiles, the Gentilian, yes, yes, a Peter moment. Yes, you know, this kind of moment in the house of the centurion where there’s a mantle falling and people were saying, those are unclean. And God’s like, whoa, whoa, whoa, How dare you call unclean what I’ve brought? And so we have to have that Cornelius moment in Japa and sometimes even more radical, Jonah experience in Nineveh where we’re challenged beyond our biases to preach the good news because the gospel’s for everybody. But let me just say this, Case, we are working against, and now I’m gonna get uber-Pentecostal on you, principalities and powers that are holding captive our worldviews and that are telling us, hey, if you, especially with secularization, I don’t know if you knew this, Case, but the longer Latinos are here, the more Americanized they become, the more secular they become.
Case Thorp
I’m sorry to hear that.
Gabriel Salguero
So Latino millennials replicate the faith journey of white millennials if they’ve been here in this country for a long time and they become more religiously unaffiliated, more secularized. And that’s true of every immigrant group. The more time they spend in the new country, especially if that country is tending towards secularization, Charles Taylor’s book on secularism, more… So younger Latinos, Gen Zs, millennials are more secular than their parents and grandparents
because they are deeply embedded in American culture and American culture is trending towards secularization. So maybe, maybe there needs to be a re -evangelization of American Christianity by immigrant groups. There’s a thought.
Case Thorp
I love it. Well, I know of Korean missionaries who are here at work in the States. To your point, I want sometimes my white brethren and sisters to recognize we often have more in common with minority evangelicals than we do. We absolutely do. Then we do with white progressive mainliners.
And it’s like even the Protestant/Catholic divide has been bridged in a way in that our pro-life stance and theirs that wasn’t a bridge there two and three generations back.
Gabriel Salguero
Look, I think that one of the things is to be mindful that unity is not uniformity. So, you know, a quote that is accredited to John Wesley in the essentials unity and the non-essentials diversity in all things charity.
Case Thorp
That’s actually the moniker for the evangelical Presbyterian Church. It is. It is. Yeah. Dude, I think maybe you’re a Presbyterian at heart. You worked at Princeton. Come on, you’re halfway there.
Gabriel Salguero
Is that right? I did not know that. God bless you. So, no, no, no. But, you know, but I love the Presbyterians. Yeah, well, I brought some tongue-speaking to Princeton. I’ll tell you, that was an experience. I brought some glossolalia. But I think that we need to, at the same time, not compromise in the non-negotiables. There is absolute truth. Jesus says, I am the way and the truth and the life. And so there are things that unite us that cannot be easily broken. But on those other things, sometimes we go to war on things that are not eternal and not transcendent. They’re ephemeral. And I lament that. I lament the brokenness of the church. I think Christ’s vision in John 17 is important and so I lament that but at the same time I’m a prisoner of hope that God is still at work through his Holy Spirit. You might remember that the prophet Zephaniah says to the exiles, right? It’s to the exiles that he says he’s a prisoner of hope too. I know you teach a theology of exile so this will go right with what you’re saying, you know. You know, he says God sings songs of victory over who?
Over the exiles. Think about scripture. How many times you see God singing. It’s not like it’s all the time. God’s people sing, but God’s singing is to the exiles. God sings to the exiles and then he says, we are prisoners of hope. And so I’ve been through some stuff. I’ve seen racism. I’ve seen divisions in the church. Like many people who’ve been Christians and followers of a cruciform Christ have seen things. But at the end of the day, I’m a prisoner of hope and like NT Wright says, sometimes we will be surprised by hope.
Case Thorp
And the fact that our covenant ancestors, the Jews, in the biblical narrative lived more in exile than they did in power. And that, when that came to light for me a few years back, it just blew my mind because the way we talk about the Jews’ journey and experience doesn’t necessarily reflect that.
Gabriel Salguero
Yeah, and I think that for me and many Latino evangelicals, exile is not a stretch. It’s an existential reality. I’m this phenomena called Jersey Rican.
Case Thorp
Yes, well and I’ve heard of New York Ricans.
Gabriel Salguero
Yes, well my wife is a New Yorker and she was born in Brooklyn and of Puerto Rican parents. I was born in New Jersey of Puerto Rican parents so I’m a Jersey Rican. Yes, there are and so the reality is that I lived a diaspora.
I was born in New Jersey of Puerto Rican parents. At home, I spoke in Spanish, and in school, I spoke in English, and I’m fully bilingual by culture. Our church, the church my father, I’m a pastor’s kid, my dad’s been a pastor for over 50 years, was multicultural from day one. We worshiped in English and Spanish. We’re talking in the 70s, so this is not when we started reading about multicultural books. It was who we were.
Case Thorp
It wasn’t politically correct.
Gabriel Salguero
No, it was what God called us to be, the Pentecost moment of Acts 2 from every nation and every tongue under the sun. So, diaspora is hard. Living in the hyphen is hard. Living in the already and not yet because…
Listen to this, Case. When I go to places to speak, whether it’s a university or college or some press gaggle or whatever, they introduce me and they say, Gabriel Salguero, Latino leader. If they just say Latino leader, people assume I’m a Democrat. And if they say, Reverend Gabriel Salguero, evangelical leader, and they don’t say anything else, they assume I’m a Republican, right? But I’m a Latino and an evangelical.
Case Thorp
Right. There you go. Yep.
Gabriel Salguero
I’m both and. So now they don’t know what they were like, wait, wait, is he a Democrat? Is he Republican? What is he? You’re like, what is this phenomenon? Yeah. And so, I embraced being evangelical. I embraced the gospel. I embraced the truth of Jesus Christ. But I also live in my own skin. There’s never a moment where I’m not who I am. And by the way, I didn’t choose that.
Case Thorp
What? Right. You’re breaking our paradigms.
Gabriel Salguero
God put me in a Latino womb, right? God in God’s sovereignty decided I would be born to Puerto Rican parents in New Jersey. I had no decision in that. But I inhabit both spaces faithfully as I follow Jesus. And that’s everybody, Irish Americans and Native Americans and white evangelicals who have to struggle sometimes with the history of culture clashes in America and Europe and other places, but also the truth of what the gospel has called them to. And so because we live in the hyphen, dear brother, and that’s everybody.
We all live in the hyphen, in the already and the not yet. I think that Latino evangelicals can be a gift to the larger church to learn how to live in the hyphen. Jesus lived in the hyphen, right? All God, all human. You know, the whole famous debate in the early centuries, homo usia and homo e usia. And so it’s okay. The city of God and the city of man, St. Augustine called us. It’s okay. Let’s embrace that we are foreigners and pilgrims and citizens, both of whatever country we’re part of, but also citizens of a kingdom that is continuously breaking in. And if you embrace that tension, I think you ask the Holy Spirit in God’s Word to let you live in that tension faithfully rather than ignoring it.
Case Thorp
Well, and that’s the very tension I hope our listeners and viewers learn to live in, that as a believer, no matter your ethnicity, in a foreign culture, meaning the world and its secularistic tendencies, we live in the hyphen. And how can I be faithful wherever I’m called? It’s good stuff. Gabriel, I think your next book, if you’ve already written one, but your next book should be called, Living in the Hyphen. That’s good.
Gabriel Salguero
I’m actually writing something called about my integrated journey. I don’t think it’s a book. I don’t know…I need more disciplines for writing a book, but I’m trying to wrestle and I appreciate that suggestion with what does it mean to be a faithful Christian in the cultures and the spaces in the time that we live in where there’s so many pressures to be all this or all that, right? Look, I’m gonna just be honest with you. I don’t know
how honest one can be on Nuance. You know, like some people will be like, if you’re not this, you’re not Christian. If you’re not Republican, you’re not Christian. If you’re not Democrat, you’re not Christian. Well, the thing is that Christianity tests all boundaries. To quote Martin Luther, just so y ‘all can, so my Lutheran friends can know I’ve read some Luther. You know, crux probat omnia.
He says Latin which means the cross tests everything. The cross tests everything. Every allegiance must bow before the cross. Political allegiances, every idolatry, political idolatry, cultural idolatry, racial idolatry. But that doesn’t mean one denies oneself to quote Shakespeare, this above all, to thine own self be true. So I’m Latino. I love being Latino. By the way, not a decision I made. God and God’s sovereignty put me in the Latino culture. But Latino doesn’t make me better than white or better than Asian or better. I celebrate my Hispanicity because that was a gift of where God put me, but not at the cost of celebrating other people where God placed them.
Case Thorp
Gabriel, thank you. This has been rich and engaging. Tell us, where can folks learn more about you and the coalition and your work?
Gabriel Salguero
Well, the church is the gathering place here in Orlando, but we have a social media at pastors, plural, Salguero, P -A -S -T -O -R -S, Salguero, on all our social media, Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, pastorssalguero. Also, @NalecNews is our Twitter handle and @NationalLatinoEvangelicalCoalition is our Facebook and social media and NALEC.org is our webpage where you can find out about our gatherings. So, and obviously we’re here, you know, you’ll see me at the Publix buying, you know, arroz con pollo and for those of you who are not from Florida, Publix is like the ShopRite in New York or whatever…
Case Thorp
My goodness. Right, right, right. Well, everybody has their Publix. So you always ask, what’s your Publix? So we’re South Orange Little Publix, because right across the street is the big Publix.
Gabriel Salguero
Yeah, my goodness, I’m like Loria Park Publix, but I love people. I love being around people. I’m an extrovert with a capital E, so I’m around and maybe I’ll come see you and surprise you at a worship time at your EPC church.
Case Thorp
Well, please do that and we need to have another conversation like this. We just, like you say, could spend four hours in hyperlink and go down some great rabbit trails. Thank you, Gabriel.
Gabriel Salguero
My honor Case, God bless you.
Case Thorp
Friends, thank you for joining us. I encourage you to like, share, and subscribe. It helps us to get the word out. Leave a review wherever you get your podcasts. Go to collaborativeorlando.com for all sorts of content. There are other Nuance podcast episodes. But if you leave your email, we will send you in the postal mail a 31-day Faith and Work prompt journal, a devotional experience to learn some of the basics of faith and work theology. You can find us also across the social media platforms.
Don’t forget Nuance Formed for Faithfulness is our weekly 10-minute devotional for the working Christian that follows the Christian liturgical calendar. I want to thank our sponsor for today, the Pratt Family Fund. I’m Case Thorp, and God’s blessings on you.
